Book folder

[Hauma Hamiddha]

Important book, needs further detailed examination



The Dravidian Languages by Bhadriraju Krishnamurti; Cambridge

University Press, Cambridge (South Asian edition), 2003; pages

545+xxvii, £70.



THIS survey of comparative historical research on Dravidian languages

is published in the Cambridge Language Surveys Series, a dozen years

after the survey of Indo-Aryan languages by Colin Masica in the same

Series. The academic field of Dravidian linguistics, opened by Robert

Caldwell in 1856, reached a watershed in 1961 with the publication of

A Dravidian Etymological Dictionary by Thomas Burrow and Murray B.

Emeneau. This resource book was the culmination of previous research

on Dravidian languages, literary and oral, and was the initiator of

new research. The new reference book by the leading Indian linguist,

Bh. Krishnamurti, synthesises all previous research and presents the

broad consensus in a comprehensive and competent manner. His academic

leadership in the field of Dravidian linguistics for more than 40

years makes this work authoritative.



The adjective Dravidian defines a family of languages differentiating

it from other families of languages in India, which are Indo-Aryan,

Munda and Tibeto-Burman, though it is commonly opposed with the

first. It also denotes a group of people who share cultural practices

and values. Its designation for a people with common political

interests is of colonial origin. The political meaning of the term

does not extend to the entire language family; it does not cover, for

example, the tribal Dravidian languages, particularly those in

central and northern India. The antecedents of the term Dravidian

like dramila, dramida and dravida found in Sanskrit sources had

varying designates historically referring to people, region or

language of the whole of the South or a part of it, that is, Tamil.

This ambivalence continues up to the modern times in cultural and

political domains. The term is used unambiguously in the present to

include the entire family when it refers to language, as is the case

in this book.



The goal of research in Dravidian linguistics is to reconstruct the

parent of the contemporary Dravidian languages from their shared

native words and grammatical features, which show regular patterns of

correspondence across languages. The scientifically reconstructed

parent is the proto-language called Proto-Dravidian. Krishnamurti

gives a picture of the Proto-Dravidian language, which, given our

current knowledge, is complete in its sound (phonological) structure,

detailed in its word (morphological) structure and suggestive in its

sentence (syntactic) structure. One would get a feel of the language

if a sample running text had been reconstructed and presented in the

book. The book describes the structures in individual languages also,

from which the reconstruction is done. There are 26 languages by the

current count, of which 25 are spoken in India and one (Brahui) is

spoken in Baluchistan on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The

reconstruction of the proto-language is preceded by a classification

of the individual languages into sub-groups based on closer

regularity and transparency of patterns. There are three sub-groups -

south, central and north Dravidian - indicating the correlation

between geography and shared linguistic features, which are

independent developments, called innovations, in each sub-group. It

is the author's contribution that the south Dravidian further

sub-divides into two with Telugu standing apart from the other three

literary languages.



The question when did the sub-groups separate from the parent

language and when did the members of each sub-group become

distinctive individual languages is an interesting and important one,

but the answer is imprecise, and often unreliable. This is a question

about the languages as spoken, not about when they came to be written

in inscriptions or in literature. Writing is a later development in

the distinction of a language, which emerges as spoken in the

beginning. Many Dravidian languages remain spoken to date. The time

depth calculated from the ratio of words retained from the parent

language out of 100 `basic' words (for example, ca 3000 BCE

determined by some scholars for Brahui to have become a separate

language) is unreliable because of the pitfalls in the methodology.

Krishnamurti, based on mention in Sanskrit works from 700 BCE on to

some currently identifiable south Dravidian tribes and speeches,

conjectures that the south Dravidian languages as a group might have

become distinctive around 1100 BCE. The emergence of individual

languages of this group, including Tamil and Telugu, must then be

later.



The south Dravidian languages, notably the literary ones, retain some

features of the parent language that are lost in all others. This

could be because the historically older language data in them are

available in their preserved written texts, which are, in addition,

conservative with regard to change in the spoken language. Of these

languages, Tamil, particularly old Tamil, and to a great extent

modern high Tamil, is most conservative; it retains a high percentage

of cognates (native words shared with the parent language and between

sister languages), retains the phonological inventory of the parent

language (presence of aaytam and zh and absence of voiced stop sounds

(g, b, etc.), for example), its structure of syllables, a good number

of phonological pairs of verbs to express transitivity (tanvinai and

piRavinai) and so on. This conservative nature of high Tamil aids the

political construction of the popular belief that Tamil is the mother

of all Dravidian languages, making Tamil and Proto-Dravidian

coalesce. Tamil in fact, as the book demonstrates, has lost some

features of the parent language (for example, word initial c- as in

cii- > ii- `to give', cup- > up-pu `salt' (related to cuv-ai `taste')

and added some (for example, avaL `she' as a pronoun separate from

atu `it').



The origin of the parent Dravidian language and its speakers is a

question that defies consensus among scholars. To know about the

origin, one would like to know the languages that are not Dravidian,

but are related to Dravidian in a distant past. Among the living

languages, genetic relationship has been suggested with far-flung

languages like Basque in Europe, Japanese in Asia and Wolof in

Africa. Their comparison with Tamil, not with Proto-Dravidian

(indicating the mistaken coalescence mentioned above in the scholarly

world also), is methodologically faulty given the time scale of any

possible relationship. There are typological and probabilistic

similarities between languages, which do not argue for a genetic

relationship. Dravidian languages have such similarities with many

languages of the world. The origin question is tied to the question

whether the Proto-Dravidian language speakers were indigenous

inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent or migrants to it in

pre-historic times. In the absence of contrary evidence to nativity,

Krishnamurti is inclined to believe that they were native to India;

if they came from another region in Asia or Europe, their migration

was earlier to that of the speakers of the parent Aryan language.

Given the widely held theory of human origin in Africa and human

migration 70,000 years ago from there to Europe and Asia in stages,

both Dravidians and Aryans came from outside India. We shall perhaps

know whether they came by the same route or different routes from

Africa when the ongoing research on correlation between specific gene

spread and language spread advances.



Reconstructing culture from the language may run into speculation

when there is no corroborating archaeological evidence. Krishnamurti

tries to give a glimpse of the way of life and the ecology of the

Proto-Dravidians from the reconstructed meanings of words in the

parent language. The Dravidians were engaged in settled agriculture

in wet and dry lands and used domesticated animals and birds (ox,

cow, sheep, pig, donkey, dog, cat, chicken) and metal implements

(plough, pick-axe, crowbar). They grew and ate grains (rice, millet),

lentils (red gram, black gram, green gram), greens, fruits (banana,

mango, wood apple), root and other vegetables (onion, ginger, yam,

radish, brinjal), and other foods and spices (sugarcane, mushroom,

sesame, black pepper, cardamom, areca nut). Some of these must have

grown wild and gathered for food, as there were wild animals

(elephant, tiger, cheetah, bear, wolf, jackal, porcupine, buffalo,

deer, hare, baboon, monkey, mongoose and iguana) and birds (peacock,

pigeon, parrot, crane, crow, sparrow, owl, eagle and vulture) in the

jungles. There were reptiles (snakes, cobra, scorpion, chameleon,

lizard) and insects (mosquito) on the ground, and amphibian and

aquatic species (frog, crab, tortoise, crocodile, shark, prawn and

fishes) in water the people frequented for hunting and fishing. There

was trade, and commodities were transported by head load and shoulder

slings. The wheeled cart was used in transport as well as in battle.

People knew navigation and used boats and floats. The metals iron,

copper, silver and gold were used for building implements and making

ornaments.



Families lived in individual houses, thatched or tiled. The

implements used for making food included mortar, pestle, grinding

stone and winnowing basket. Food was cooked in utensils by boiling in

water, roasting in fire and frying in oil. Milk was cultured into

buttermilk and butter. Clothes were made from cotton. The kin formed

an elaborate and close-knit structure as the foundation of the

society. The common word for the female sibling of the father, spouse

of the male sibling of the mother and mother-in-law and another

common word for their spouses indicate cross-cousin marriage and, by

extension, other matriarchal features. The occupations practised

besides farming were weaving, pot making, smithy and toddy tapping.

Herbal medicines (mar-am (tree) and mar-untu (medicine) are

etymologically related) were used to treat diseases (that included

small pox, measles and insanity). There was deafness and blindness

(including cataract). The internal organs of the body (brain, heart,

lungs, liver, intestine, bone, bone marrow, nerves), known from

hunted animals, were perhaps part of the knowledge of human anatomy.



The settlement of people was protected by a chieftain, who was paid

tribute and whose strong men fought adversaries using swords, clubs

and bows. God was the king (koo) and the spirit (pee-y) and was

worshipped by sacrificing animals to get wishes granted. Seeing and

counting were knowing (teri - `to be visible, to know') and thinking

(eN - `to count, to think'). Knowledge was considered pure (teL - `to

become clear, to understand') and white (veL - `to be white, to

know'). The counting system was well developed, perhaps to aid trade.

The celestial bodies (sun, moon and stars) were crucial to the life

cycle of the people and the time was divided into year, month and day

based on their movement.



The above description of the life of Proto-Dravidians is necessarily

in broad strokes (not very different from the contemporary rural

Dravidian life) and it is incomplete. Absence of words for some

concepts in the language may not suggest absence of those concepts in

the culture, but may be suggestive of coding those concepts by

expressions larger than words and of loss of the native words by

replacement with words from another language in contact. Any

description of Dravidian languages and culture will be inadequate

without considering the influences of other languages and cultures

they came into contact with along the path of migration or in the

settled area. The reconstruction of the Proto-Dravidian language and

Proto-Dravidian culture will be an abstraction of reality in this

sense, since the language and culture might be interacting with

others of their times and be influenced by them. That languages

rarely function in isolation presents the truism that the past is not

necessarily pristine. Krishnamurti briefly describes the influence

between the Dravidian and other languages, primarily classical

Sanskrit. Such mutual influences make India one linguistic area with

many languages.



This book tells everything we know linguistically to date about the

history and nature of Dravidian languages as a family. It is meant

for scholars in the field, but provides authentic information for

interested lay persons also. Anyone who is interested in the

Dravidian languages for whatever purpose must read this book to know

the scientific linguistic facts about them.



E. Annamalai is former Director, Central Institute of Indian

Languages, Mysore.